Question: What role does the biological blueprint play?

Transcript: Well I believe that you cannot get from an “is” to an “ought”. I think that David Hume very much established that so that we can say . . . I am interested in evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, and so that we can say that people respond to attractive faces positively. And that in fact, there are some universals about what people find attractive that you can see them babies. It’s not just Madison Avenue and Vogue magazine that invented, you know, what’s a pretty face. I can accept that as a fact of biology, and understand the evolutionary arguments behind it. That does not mean that then I say well, you know, you should equate that with virtue. Or you should equate that with goodness. To the contrary. I say that, in fact, we have a problem that we insist on either denying the reality that we respond positively to good looking people. Which that’s one thing. Oh no, it’s just manipulation. I want to . . . And that’s the one extreme. And then the other extreme is to just say, “Yes. The good, the true and the beautiful are all one thing.” And I want to say, “No, no, no! They’re different.” And in fact beauty is good in its own right, but it’s not goodness. It’s another thing. And that’s just an example. That’s one that I talk about in “The Substance of Style”. I think that you cannot ground what people ought to do simply in biological imperatives. I think that you can gain a lot of insights about the operation of human psychology and human societies from biology. But a lot of the great progress – whether you’re talking about moral progress, or economic progress, or whatever . . . technological progress – that common civilization has come from is getting away from certain things that seem to be biologically engrained. For example, the difficulty of trusting strangers or people from outside a very small group; the great triumph of sort of modern economies is this vast realm of being able to trust strangers. And part of that is institutional, but also our psychologies have changed through cultural evolution, not through biological evolution; but we’ve learned when to trust and when not to. Especially when you have a lot of transition in society, there can be some problems with that, both being too trusting or not trusting enough; but that’s an example of something that if you just say, “Well whatever biology says is good is good”, that won’t get you there very far. So I’m very interested in biology.

Question: What implications does this have for morality?

Transcript: I’m very interested in what it means to be a biological creature, and where does consciousness come from, and all of those kinds of things. But I think ultimately you sort of have to take responsibility for saying, you know, “We don’t care that you are biologically programmed to be a serial killer. We care what you did.” And I actually think that that’s going to be a big issue for societies as we learn more and more about the brain, and the biological basis of various behaviors . . . is how do you think about good and evil? Do you think of them as being about causes or about consequences? And I come down very much on the consequences view, but you can still make judgments. And I’ve used this in a very different context. I thought about . . . There’s this argument that we should be accepting of gays because they can’t help it. You know they are just biologically programmed. Well that may be that they’re biologically programmed. Whatever. But that’s not why I think that we should accept gays and have gay marriage. It’s because there’s nothing wrong with it. It doesn’t hurt anybody. And there’s nothing damaging about it. And I think you made that argument regardless of where it comes from. And at the same time there will be people who think it’s morally wrong. And there will be people who are biologically homosexual who think it’s morally wrong. And some of them will choose to live a different life. And you know, people have been burned at the stake for their religious beliefs, which I think it’s a lot harder than being celibate. I don’t know. I haven’t done either. I haven’t conducted these experiments. I think if I had the choice, I wouldn’t go for the being burned at the stake.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Transcript: Well I am optimistic on balance. So if I had to pick, I would probably pick an optimistic scenario. Although I could convince myself of really, really bad scenarios as well. Everybody is dying from smallpox, from biological warfare, or there are loose nukes everywhere. Or everybody retreats into a new futilism because there is a big question. One of the big questions going forward is, how physically secure will people feel? Whether it’s from whatever. And if they don’t feel physically secure, where will the threats be coming from? So that’s a big question mark. But let’s take the optimistic Virginia. I think that if, especially if people are allowed to experiment, and we’re able to tap the kind of dispersed knowledge and dispersed creativity that exists in a world with 6 billion plus minds in it, there’s a lot of positive that can come out of that, including countering the creative people who want to do bad things to other people. I have a great faith in the ability of people to muddle through incrementalism, and problem solving that is improvisational and sort of done on the fly. It doesn’t always work, but people are very creative when confronted with new situations. And I think people have collectively an amazing adaptability far more than people sort of acknowledge to themselves.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Question: When you read the newspaper or watch the news, what issues stand out to you?

Transcript: Well one issue is one that I’ve already touched on, which is the issue of what does it mean to understand human beings as biological creatures, as material, as manipulable? Aside from the obvious benefits of being able to cure diseases and extend life, which have their own implications for societies . . . If everybody starts to live a long time what does that mean? We’re already experienced a doubling of life expectancy worldwide over a hundred years or so. Really quite remarkable. That changes the way societies organize themselves. Not in the sense that people say, “Okay. Now we’re going to get married later and have fewer children.” But it happens partly because of life extension. There’s that . . . sort of the obvious social consequences, but then there’s the deeper philosophical issues. If we are really material, what does that mean? How do we think about that? What do we think about consciousness? If it’s an emergent property of chemical reactions as opposed to a little ghost in your head, does that make you feel worse about yourself in the same way that maybe if you have to give up and be . . . universe centered on earth and man, does that make you feel worse about yourself? You know amazingly enough we got use to that, and we don’t feel worse about ourselves than we did with the earth as the center of the universe. I think we’ll get over this other too. But it raises a lot of issues. What do you do about when you find the biological roots of certain kinds of criminal behavior, or socially destructive behavior? How do you deal with that? It’s a deep, difficult question, especially if the person hasn’t actually done anything bad. How do you think about that? Or if they have done something bad, then you can say we identified the gene that led to this personality disorder. Does that get them off if they killed six people or something? So that, I think, is one big area.

Question: What role does religion play in today’s world?

Transcript: Obviously another area that everybody talks about these days is it has to do with religion. How do we . . . There was this notion among the intellectual elites in the west and . . . that religion would just die out over time. I . . . Because I came from a religious place where everybody’s religious, I sort of found that hard to imagine. There’s a huge religious impulse in human beings. Maybe it’s biologically wired in, and people if they don’t . . . it expresses itself in many, many, different ways. And so I think that if you study the diversity of religion, it sort of takes away from the notion of sort of one true faith. But I also think it takes away from the notion of, “Oh everyone is inevitably going to be secular.” Because if that’s the case, wouldn’t it have happened already someplace? So that’s an interesting thing. I think another thing is the coming together of east and west. This has been going on for 50 years. Anything in history you can always date to an earlier period. But there . . . we have been able in the past to think about western culture, Chinese culture, Japanese culture, or eastern culture more generally. Indian culture, these very distinct, big civilizations over broad geographical regions as having separate cultures. They are increasingly cross fertilizing each other. And they are maintaining . . . If you’re in the United States, you don’t think you’re in India. You don’t even think you’re in Canada necessarily. And if you’re in Texas, you don’t think you’re in California. I mean there’s still regional differences, and I think those will remain. But they’ll become more subtle. And they will become fertilized by other people often in weird ways so that the person who is from India will not necessarily recognize as their religion the weird, Californized version of their religion. But you see that sort of cross fertilization, and I think that that’s a big story. That’s a sort of world historical story and then what of course everyone . . . I feel stupid even saying this, but then of course again that is the claim of religions in particular that have a sort of pure, “you must be our way” – Islam, certain versions of Christianity – that are universalistic religions. Which means on the one hand that they see God as offering his salvation to everyone. It’s not tribal, it’s not ethnic, it’s not narrowly nationalistic. On the other hand, they have the conversion impulse, and in some cases the violent conversion impulse. And that clashes with this more cross fertilization, pluralistic world. So that’s obviously a big conflict that we see ourselves in.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Question: What forces have shaped humanity most?

Transcript: Well I think that there is a drive in human beings, and perhaps in some of our ancestors . . . ape ancestors as well . . . There’s something that happens to human beings where there is a kind of dissatisfaction. Where it can be as simple as a tool that doesn’t work very well, and you modify it so it works better. There is sort of a drive to make incremental improvements. And it could be, you know, you really hate the way your parents behaved towards you. So when you have kids you’re gonna do it a different way. And maybe it’s better and maybe it’s worse. And your kids then do it a different way. And it can be as simple as modifying recipes. It can be as big as, you know, writing the U.S. Constitution and sort of creating a new country. And there’s a learning process that takes place with that. It’s a lot of modest changes and experiments that add up over time to major progress. And you don’t necessarily know where you’re headed. There’s a writer named Henry Patrosky who’s a civil engineering professor at Duke. And he writes about the evolution of technical things . . . of objects and artifacts. And he has this great phrase: “Form follows failure” which is of course a play on “Form follows function.” And his idea is when you have an artifact, as soon as it exists, you find the things that you don’t like about it. And the existence of the initial artifact allows you to innovate and say, “Oh well, this is how we’d like to improve it.” And I think that’s a process that goes far beyond artifacts. It is how we get technological improvements, but it is not the only way. So that’s . . . That doesn’t account for everything of how we’ve done all this, but that’s a lot of it.

Question: How has individual action shaped humanity?

Transcript: I think there is a power of individuals when they interact a lot together. There’s an idea that I sort of took from Daniel Boorstin – as you can see I am a big synthesizer . . . everything has a footnote for somebody else – called ________, which is the idea of different things coming together. So it could be ethnic groups trading. Different geographical regions coming together. This notion that’s where a lot of creativity takes place. And I think that a lot of the creative power of cities over the centuries has come from that sort of being a place where people of some kind of difference interact in a positive . . . usually more in a positive way. Trade is a lot of that. Various forms of learning is a lot of that. Even things like missionary efforts can take place there, and that you know . . . There’s positives and negatives, but that’s ultimately where you come from. This sort of exchange is where a lot of the sort of progress, and growth, and development of civilizations come from. And then there are things that you just go, “How could that happen?” It’s so amazing. There are bad things that happen to you, but even on the positive side, how is it . . . I’ve been reading a lot about Renaissance ________. How did that happen? What is the historian’s puzzle of this? How do you have this flourishing of art in certain places or of science in certain places? What was it about Vienna in the early 20th century, or Budapest that allowed these great minds to prosper ________ each other in such interesting ways? Or London or Edinburgh in the 18th century. What happened there? What was going on with the founding fathers? They seem like a remarkable group of people. That had something to do with interaction. The parts are great, but the whole is even somehow greater than the sum of the parts. And these are, I think in some sense, historical mysteries, but really worthy of thinking about and studying. Because they go beyond the simple incrementalism of saying there could be progress even if it is very modest efforts of making better toothpaste or whatever.

Question: How has America changed in your lifetime?

Transcript: We take for granted things that are vast changes in a very short period of time. Before World War II, the U.S. was extremely divided geographically. There was not . . . People didn’t travel. Most people didn’t travel very far outside their region. There was relatively little national media. And of course there were, while we had had a period of large-scale immigration, at that time there was much more culturally homogeneous population. But also, it was a population that each individual person within whatever world they lived could think the rest of the country was like them. I actually am a little skeptical about how homogeneous the population was. There was kind of a model that the world was like you, or the world was like some standard. We’ve gone from that world to not only a diverse world, but one where everyone is interacting with everybody else. And there’s fragmentation and specialization, but also much more national chains. National media. National travel. Plane travels. Everybody complains the airlines are full of people and it’s very stressful, but that’s a very big difference and allows you to travel great distances. Tremendous changes. Technological changes. Life span changes. And then things like family structure have changed enormously. When Louise Brown was born in England – the first test tube baby – all those bioethical thinkers and chin pullers like me were saying, “Oh, this is a big revolution in human affairs.” Now it’s just like your relative. So there are all these test tube babies. And big deal. They’re just babies and they’re in families. And families are not maybe exactly the same as they were, but the family as an institution hasn’t disappeared. It’s just evolved. People assimilate seemingly radical changes into the normal world. And then they often seem just like the way things have always been, even though they’re not.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Question: Do you have a personal philosophy?

Transcript: Well there is a philosophy, but it’s not a simple creed. Which is hard for people to understand sometimes because I’ve edited this libertarian magazine for 10 years. And a lot of people think that can be summed up as something like government is bad, which I don’t believe. Or even freedom is good, which I do believe; but then what do you mean by freedom and exactly how do you express it? I think that there is a belief in potential of the individual, and individuals who join together to do things . . . voluntarily joining together to do things, creating institutions. I have a great belief in the value of learning as both an individual endeavor and a social endeavor. And a lot of what “The Future and Its Enemies” is really about at its core is how societies learn. And in some sense whether there’s some places you shouldn’t go, and whether it’s okay to have open-ended learning. How you find improvement. I have a sort of belief that we only get one life, and that while some people would take that to mean, you know, “Oh you should just be cool to other people,” I take it to mean that you really need to value other people’s lives and your own, and to maximize what you do with your life, and to recognize the value of other people’s lives as well. And looks to ways to improve the quality of the lives of others as well as yourself. And by the way, I don’t think there is anything wrong . . . This is not some sort of self abnegation. I believe that people should look to do well by themselves as well. But I like the Scottish philosophers that I very much admire from the 18th century. Hume and Smith and those people. I put a very high value on sympathy and empathy, and this sort of morale imagination to put yourself in another person’s place.

Question: How do you see your philosophy in relation to biology?

Transcript: Well I believe that you cannot get from an “is” to an “ought”. I think that David Hume very much established that so that we can say . . . I am interested in evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, and so that we can say that people respond to attractive faces positively. And that in fact, there are some universals about what people find attractive that you can see them babies. It’s not just Madison Avenue and Vogue magazine that invented, you know, what’s a pretty face. I can accept that as a fact of biology, and understand the evolutionary arguments behind it. That does not mean that then I say well, you know, you should equate that with virtue. Or you should equate that with goodness. To the contrary. I say that, in fact, we have a problem that we insist on either denying the reality that we respond positively to good looking people. Which that’s one thing. Oh no, it’s just manipulation. I want to . . . And that’s the one extreme. And then the other extreme is to just say, “Yes. The good, the true and the beautiful are all one thing.” And I want to say, “No, no, no! They’re different.” And in fact beauty is good in its own right, but it’s not goodness. It’s another thing. And that’s just an example. That’s one that I talk about in “The Substance of Style”. I think that you cannot ground what people ought to do simply in biological imperatives. I think that you can gain a lot of insights about the operation of human psychology and human societies from biology. But a lot of the great progress – whether you’re talking about moral progress, or economic progress, or whatever . . . technological progress – that common civilization has come from is getting away from certain things that seem to be biologically engrained. For example, the difficulty of trusting strangers or people from outside a very small group; the great triumph of sort of modern economies is this vast realm of being able to trust strangers. And part of that is institutional, but also our psychologies have changed through cultural evolution, not through biological evolution; but we’ve learned when to trust and when not to. Especially when you have a lot of transition in society, there can be some problems with that, both being too trusting or not trusting enough; but that’s an example of something that if you just say, “Well whatever biology says is good is good”, that won’t get you there very far. So I’m very interested in biology. I’m very interested in what it means to be a biological creature, and where does consciousness come from, and all of those kinds of things. But I think ultimately you sort of have to take responsibility for saying, you know, “We don’t care that you are biologically programmed to be a serial killer. We care what you did.” And I actually think that that’s going to be a big issue for societies as we learn more and more about the brain, and the biological basis of various behaviors . . . is how do you think about good and evil? Do you think of them as being about causes or about consequences? And I come down very much on the consequences view, but you can still make judgments. And I’ve used this in a very different context. I thought about . . . There’s this argument that we should be accepting of gays because they can’t help it. You know they are just biologically programmed. Well that may be that they’re biologically programmed. Whatever. But that’s not why I think that we should accept gays and have gay marriage. It’s because there’s nothing wrong with it. It doesn’t hurt anybody. And there’s nothing damaging about it. And I think you made that argument regardless of where it comes from. And at the same time there will be people who think it’s morally wrong. And there will be people who are biologically homosexual who think it’s morally wrong. And some of them will choose to live a different life. And you know, people have been burned at the stake for their religious beliefs, which I think it’s a lot harder than being celibate. I don’t know. I haven’t done either. I haven’t conducted these experiments. I think if I had the choice, I wouldn’t go for the being burned at the stake.

Question: How do you understand free will?

Transcript: Oh my god. People who are a lot smarter than me have thought about this. I don’t think . . . What do you mean by free will, I guess is the question. Randomness is not free will. I’m not a dualist, although we all are instinctively from childhood dualists. We think there’s a little man in our head or a little woman in my case. And that person is acting and choosing. And if there’s not really a little person in your head, then you don’t have free will. But how can that be? That doesn’t make any sense to me either. So I think you just kind of . . . however, what . . . I’m not a philosopher as I say. And people much smarter than I am have dealt with this. But the way I think about it is you just . . . it may be your biology is telling you to do these things or whatever; but you act as if you have free will. And then the real interesting question is then when do you come to modify the biochemical processes that direct your behavior? And I have both sort of a professional interest in this question, and also a personal interest because I have suffered from depression. And I . . . to me . . . and I’ve had a happy childhood. I have no traumas in my life. You know, if we were back in the days where we understood depression in some Freudian way, there would be nothing . . . I couldn’t account for it. Why should I have this depression? It’s like the flu. I would be perfectly fine one day and then terribly, terribly, depressed the next day. And I do take, not so much anymore . . . but not so much _________ anymore. I have taken Prozac and it helps. And it makes me what I think of as the normal me. Sort of like Claritin D cures your allergies. It’s the same. To me, I experience it in the same way as I would experience any other kind of medication. But that does raise . . . People love to think about these issues. Well is the real Virginia the despairing, depressed Virginia? Or is it the happy-go-lucky Virginia? Most people who know me would say it’s sort of the cheerful one, and actually people tend to be surprised that I’ve been depressed. But that’s an interesting question of “Who is the real you?” And when you’re in an era when you can sort of modify the real you, I would argue that the choice to modify or not is a sort of self-fashioning choice. You’re deciding what kind of person you want to be and who is the you . . . It’s very deep. Far too deep for me. Far too deep for me.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Transcript: Okay. Why I came here is because I’m a contributing editor for the Atlantic, and they asked me would I come and help out with the Atlantic, and I figured it would be a stimulating environment, and a pretty place, and fun, and I wanna be a good part of the team. So that’s why I came and I’m moderating a couple panels. What I would say is that the festival means most . . . I have gone to some really wonderful panels, but I’ve been less impressed than I could have been by the festival and I actually wrote kind of a . . . not kind of, very negative blog post about the first session. I think that it needs to be . . . a big question . . . The panels work best when they’re focused and sort of edited in the sense that you think who . . . what’s a really important or interesting question? And who would be the people that we would want to answer this question? So for example, there was a really great panel on nuclear proliferation that had the people you would want to hear talk about the question. It’s a hard question, and it’s focused. The ones that work badly are . . . We had a fun one last night that I was moderator of; but I thought it was you know . . . It was just like Women and American Culture. “Oh, they’re all women. Let’s just stick them on this panel and have them talk about women.” And I don’t know exactly how it came to be because I came in at the end of it; but I didn’t think that somebody sat down and thought of a really interesting question and the best people to answer the question. I think there should be more social science integrated, especially if you’re going to talk about policy issues like environmental issues. It’s not simply a scientific issue. You need to bring in economics and bring in some of these other things. And I think there needs to be a greater premium on . . . and this is just my personal taste and people obviously like it, so I’m telling you everything that is critical. This is “form follows failure”. We have the Aspen Festival Idea. How can it be better? I like conferences that are edited. I like conferences . . . I was a magazine editor. I like where you sit down and you think what questions do we want to ask, and how do we want to put to together. Who should we get? As opposed to ask a bunch of people and then throw them on panels, which in some cases is what happened here. You get interesting people, but they are not necessarily focused on the thing they do best. And then the other thing is I think you could get more interesting people. There are people out there who are less well known, less part of the conventional wisdom who have really interesting ideas to bare on this . . . and who are well established and have good reputations, but just are not necessarily in the circuit. And a lot of what I do in life is find those people. Find those really interesting people so that’s . . . and if Walter wants to call me that’s what I do. I’d be happy to help him out.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Transcript: We take for granted things that are vast changes in a very short period of time. Before World War II, the U.S. was extremely divided geographically. There was not . . . People didn’t travel. Most people didn’t travel very far outside their region. There was relatively little national media. And of course there were, while we had had a period of large-scale immigration, at that time there was much more culturally homogeneous population. But also, it was a population that each individual person within whatever world they lived could think the rest of the country was like them. I actually am a little skeptical about how homogeneous the population was. There was kind of a model that the world was like you, or the world was like some standard. We’ve gone from that world to not only a diverse world, but one where everyone is interacting with everybody else. And there’s fragmentation and specialization, but also much more national chains. National media. National travel. Plane travels. Everybody complains the airlines are full of people and it’s very stressful, but that’s a very big difference and allows you to travel great distances. Tremendous changes. Technological changes. Life span changes. And then things like family structure have changed enormously. When Louise Brown was born in England – the first test tube baby – all those bioethical thinkers and chin pullers like me were saying, “Oh, this is a big revolution in human affairs.” Now it’s just like your relative. So there are all these test tube babies. And big deal. They’re just babies and they’re in families. And families are not maybe exactly the same as they were, but the family as an institution hasn’t disappeared. It’s just evolved. People assimilate seemingly radical changes into the normal world. And then they often seem just like the way things have always been, even though they’re not.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Transcript: I think another thing is the coming together of east and west. This has been going on for 50 years. Anything in history you can always date to an earlier period. But there . . . we have been able in the past to think about western culture, Chinese culture, Japanese culture, or eastern culture more generally. Indian culture, these very distinct, big civilizations over broad geographical regions as having separate cultures. They are increasingly cross fertilizing each other. And they are maintaining . . . If you’re in the United States, you don’t think you’re in India. You don’t even think you’re in Canada necessarily. And if you’re in Texas, you don’t think you’re in California. I mean there’s still regional differences, and I think those will remain. But they’ll become more subtle. And they will become fertilized by other people often in weird ways so that the person who is from India will not necessarily recognize as their religion the weird, Californized version of their religion. But you see that sort of cross fertilization, and I think that that’s a big story. That’s a sort of world historical story and then what of course everyone . . . I feel stupid even saying this, but then of course again that is the claim of religions in particular that have a sort of pure, “you must be our way” – Islam, certain versions of Christianity – that are universalistic religions. Which means on the one hand that they see God as offering his salvation to everyone. It’s not tribal, it’s not ethnic, it’s not narrowly nationalistic. On the other hand, they have the conversion impulse, and in some cases the violent conversion impulse. And that clashes with this more cross fertilization, pluralistic world. So that’s obviously a big conflict that we see ourselves in. And then, of course, there is this whole issue of where technology will take us. And anything that anybody tells you about technology that goes beyond 10 years is . . . you can’t predict it at all. We have no idea.

Recorded on: 7/4/2007 at The Aspen Ideas Festival

Transcript:
Obviously another area that everybody talks about these days is it has to do with religion. How do we . . . There was this notion among the intellectual elites in the west and . . . that religion would just die out over time. I . . . Because I came from a religious place where everybody’s religious, I sort of found that hard to imagine. There’s a huge religious impulse in human beings. Maybe it’s biologically wired in, and people if they don’t . . . it expresses itself in many, many, different ways. And so I think that if you study the diversity of religion, it sort of takes away from the notion of sort of one true faith. But I also think it takes away from the notion of, “Oh everyone is inevitably going to be secular.” Because if that’s the case, wouldn’t it have happened already someplace?

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Transcript: what does it mean to understand human beings as biological creatures, as material, as manipulable? Aside from the obvious benefits of being able to cure diseases and extend life, which have their own implications for societies . . . If everybody starts to live a long time what does that mean? We’re already experienced a doubling of life expectancy worldwide over a hundred years or so. Really quite remarkable. That changes the way societies organize themselves. Not in the sense that people say, “Okay. Now we’re going to get married later and have fewer children.” But it happens partly because of life extension. There’s that . . . sort of the obvious social consequences, but then there’s the deeper philosophical issues. If we are really material, what does that mean? How do we think about that? What do we think about consciousness? If it’s an emergent property of chemical reactions as opposed to a little ghost in your head, does that make you feel worse about yourself in the same way that maybe if you have to give up and be . . . universe centered on earth and man, does that make you feel worse about yourself? You know amazingly enough we got use to that, and we don’t feel worse about ourselves than we did with the earth as the center of the universe. I think we’ll get over this other too. But it raises a lot of issues. What do you do about when you find the biological roots of certain kinds of criminal behavior, or socially destructive behavior? How do you deal with that? It’s a deep, difficult question, especially if the person hasn’t actually done anything bad. How do you think about that? Or if they have done something bad, then you can say we identified the gene that led to this personality disorder. Does that get them off if they killed six people or something? So that, I think, is one big area.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Transcript: Well I think that there is a drive in human beings, and perhaps in some of our ancestors . . . ape ancestors as well . . . There’s something that happens to human beings where there is a kind of dissatisfaction. Where it can be as simple as a tool that doesn’t work very well, and you modify it so it works better. There is sort of a drive to make incremental improvements. And it could be, you know, you really hate the way your parents behaved towards you. So when you have kids you’re gonna do it a different way. And maybe it’s better and maybe it’s worse. And your kids then do it a different way. And it can be as simple as modifying recipes. It can be as big as, you know, writing the U.S. Constitution and sort of creating a new country. And there’s a learning process that takes place with that. And a lot of that learning – and this is one of the message in “The Future and Its Enemies” is very incremental. It’s a lot of modest changes and experiments that add up over time to major progress. And you don’t necessarily know where you’re headed. There’s a writer named Henry Patrosky who’s a civil engineering professor at Duke. And he writes about the evolution of technical things . . . of objects and artifacts. And he has this great phrase: “Form follows failure” which is of course a play on “Form follows function.” And his idea is when you have an artifact, as soon as it exists, you find the things that you don’t like about it. And the existence of the initial artifact allows you to innovate and say, “Oh well, this is how we’d like to improve it.” And I think that’s a process that goes far beyond artifacts. It is how we get technological improvements, but it is not the only way. So that’s . . . That doesn’t account for everything of how we’ve done all this, but that’s a lot of it. I think there is a power of individuals when they interact a lot together. There’s an idea that I sort of took from Daniel Boorstin – as you can see I am a big synthesizer . . . everything has a footnote for somebody else – called ________, which is the idea of different things coming together. So it could be ethnic groups trading. Different geographical regions coming together. This notion that’s where a lot of creativity takes place. And I think that a lot of the creative power of cities over the centuries has come from that sort of being a place where people of some kind of difference interact in a positive . . . usually more in a positive way. Trade is a lot of that. Various forms of learning is a lot of that. Even things like missionary efforts can take place there, and that you know . . . There’s positives and negatives, but that’s ultimately where you come from. This sort of exchange is where a lot of the sort of progress, and growth, and development of civilizations come from. And then there are things that you just go, “How could that happen?” It’s so amazing. There are bad things that happen to you, but even on the positive side, how is it . . . I’ve been reading a lot about Renaissance ________. How did that happen? What is the historian’s puzzle of this? How do you have this flourishing of art in certain places or of science in certain places? What was it about Vienna in the early 20th century, or Budapest that allowed these great minds to prosper ________ each other in such interesting ways? Or London or Edinburgh in the 18th century. What happened there? What was going on with the founding fathers? They seem like a remarkable group of people. That had something to do with interaction. The parts are great, but the whole is even somehow greater than the sum of the parts. And these are, I think in some sense, historical mysteries, but really worthy of thinking about and studying. Because they go beyond the simple incrementalism of saying there could be progress even if it is very modest efforts of making better toothpaste or whatever.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Transcript: Oh my god. People who are a lot smarter than me have thought about this. I don’t think . . . What do you mean by free will, I guess is the question. Randomness is not free will. I’m not a dualist, although we all are instinctively from childhood dualists. We think there’s a little man in our head or a little woman in my case. And that person is acting and choosing. And if there’s not really a little person in your head, then you don’t have free will. But how can that be? That doesn’t make any sense to me either. So I think you just kind of . . . however, what . . . I’m not a philosopher as I say. And people much smarter than I am have dealt with this. But the way I think about it is you just . . . it may be your biology is telling you to do these things or whatever; but you act as if you have free will. And then the real interesting question is then when do you come to modify the biochemical processes that direct your behavior? And I have both sort of a professional interest in this question, and also a personal interest because I have suffered from depression. And I . . . to me . . . and I’ve had a happy childhood. I have no traumas in my life. You know, if we were back in the days where we understood depression in some Freudian way, there would be nothing . . . I couldn’t account for it. Why should I have this depression? It’s like the flu. I would be perfectly fine one day and then terribly, terribly, depressed the next day. And I do take, not so much anymore . . . but not so much _________ anymore. I have taken Prozac and it helps. And it makes me what I think of as the normal me. Sort of like Claritin D cures your allergies. It’s the same. To me, I experience it in the same way as I would experience any other kind of medication. But that does raise . . . People love to think about these issues. Well is the real Virginia the despairing, depressed Virginia? Or is it the happy-go-lucky Virginia? Most people who know me would say it’s sort of the cheerful one, and actually people tend to be surprised that I’ve been depressed. But that’s an interesting question of “Who is the real you?” And when you’re in an era when you can sort of modify the real you, I would argue that the choice to modify or not is a sort of self-fashioning choice. You’re deciding what kind of person you want to be and who is the you . . . It’s very deep. Far too deep for me. Far too deep for me.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Transcript: People sometimes come up to me after I give talks. They say, “Oh tell me about your methodology,” and I really wish I had a good answer to that. You know, it’s kind of like, “Well, I walk around and I look at things, and I read a lot.” And when I find out about an interesting person I will sometimes try to interview them, particularly if I can come up with an article, and I sleep on it. Quite literally, I get a lot of these ideas while I’m asleep or in that sort of twilight zone. And the process of writing actually helps too, because just as somebody who does mathematical modeling has to sit down and actually take their vague notion and to turn it into equations, in the case of me writing, while I take, you know, I usually start with some sort of intuition and then I refine it. And while I’m actually sitting there I’ll have other ideas. And I’ll realize, “Oh that doesn’t really logically follow” What about this? What about that? I look for interesting academic research, which is often hard to find because if you don’t have a popularizer who’s already popularized it, how do you find it? It’s easier for me within the world of economics because I know a lot of economists. I wrote an economics column for the New York Times for six years, and over the course of doing that I learned a lot. But I learned how to do it in other fields, and you follow footnotes. You read an interesting book, it has footnotes. You go look up the things that they’ve footnoted. I read a lot of history. I think that we have a tremendous amount to learn about the present and the future from studying the past. Not just in the sense of where we got here, but in less sort of linear sense of analogy, and inspiration, and synthesis.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Transcription: today all my policy work is actually on trying to reform organ donation policy. I want to get rid of the waiting list for kidneys. That’s my goal. And I’m working with some other people on that. I became a kidney donor about a year ago. And from that experience was because a friend needed a kidney, I became aware that there is this really terrible problem. Terrible shortages. It’s not something that can be solved by everybody signing up as a donor on the driver’s license, because there actually aren’t enough deceased donors. Even if everybody donated, the numbers don’t add up because you have to die in the right way. So we need to get more living donors, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how that might be done. And the thing is it’s unlike curing AIDS or making Africa rich, all these things that people try to do. This is really – in the scheme of things – a small, solvable problem that we ought . . . It ought not to be a problem. We have all the tools available, but we do have to change some attitudes and institutions. So that’s my policy work now. Who knows if I will succeed in that? And not just me but some other people who I’ve worked with. That would be a big deal, at least for the 72,000 people who are waiting for kidneys.

Recorded on: 7/4/2007 at The Aspen Ideas Festival

Transcript: Another area that I’ve done a lot of work in, and to me is a continuation of my interest and innovation, is I was one of the early people to realize that there was something really going on in what I call aesthetics and a lot of people call it design; but I think it’s nonfunctional areas of design are the most interesting ones. And I wrote a book called “The Substance of Style” which is very much about why it is that these sort of surfaces – the look and feel of things – are genuinely valuable. That it’s not some kind of deception or manipulation. I mean there may be sometimes deception or manipulation, but that’s not primarily what it’s about. It’s not primarily about status. That people derive genuine value from this and they are able to express who they are, and they get genuine sort of sensual pleasure from it, and that that’s valuable.

I’m very interested in the, as are many people, in sort of the biological century. What does it mean to think about human beings as biological creatures, and to increasingly understand what that means, and to increasingly have control over it? Which is actually a subset of a broader interest of mine which is in the relationship between the natural and the artificial. And there’s a chapter in “The Future and its Enemies” about nature and artifice, which I think is the best chapter in the book. There’s this tension. It’s a theme that comes up in the substance of style, because style is an artificial construct. What does it mean, particularly when you think about a human being? What’s authenticity? Is it looking the way you sort of . . . that you have gray hair that shows you’re a certain age? Or is it your personality that you would dye your hair blond, or brown, or green, or whatever? Which is the authentic thing? And that’s related to nature in artifice.

How you negotiate the intractable conflicts of value that occur. How you minimize conflict given that people are really different and that’s the fact that people are really different. The existence of human heterogeneity. The fact that people . . . I do not think like you exactly. We have a lot of things in common, but we really are different people. There are different subsets of people. That’s true whether you are thinking about biology. That’s true whether you’re thinking about values, life paths. How do we take advantage of that, which is what economic specialization is all about. What are the . . . there’s a tremendous amount you can learn from the . . . I use the word heterogeneity because diversity has taken on this narrow sense of ethnic diversity, which is one form of heterogeneity, but by no means the only form. How do we deal with that in a positive way? What are the institutions and organizations and just attitudes that make that a positive thing? And how do we negotiate the conflicts that come from the fact that people really have different tastes and really have different values? And a tremendous amount of our public discourse is about why my preferences ought to be everybody’s preferences. So for example, I’ve done a lot of writing on the urban forum, and cities, and the evolution of retailing, and urban spaces. It’s sort of an area that interests me. Well one of the things that comes up again, and again, and again in that area is that people want every neighborhood to look like their ideal neighborhood. And what . . . My message there is let’s have a pluralist. Like let’s accept . . . The same way we accept different churches, and different religions, and different political views, we also have different aesthetic views, and different lifestyles. And some people want to live in high density neighborhoods where they can walk to things. And some people want their little patch of suburbia with their yard, and their dog, and their kids. And other people want to live in the countryside. And we shouldn’t say that there’s one right land use planning way. So that’s just one example of heterogeneity. I mean another more purely business and technology story that I’m currently working on is I’m looking at the incredible problem of how do you attach sizes to clothing? How do you . . . it’s not just big versus little. It’s how do you do the proportions. Everybody’s body is different. People who have the same height and weight may have vastly different proportions, and there are tremendous difficulties when we have standardized production and heterogeneous population of consumers. There’s a business problem. There’s a technology problem. There are issues of how you take advantage of certain information technology we have today. And there’s also a psychological issue. Because then people come into the store and nothing fits. It’s not just fat or skinny. It’s not just they needed a bigger size and they don’t want to admit they’ve put on a few pounds. It doesn’t fit because they don’t have a standardized body, and then they feel like there’s something wrong with them because they’re not “standard”. And I think that’s a metaphor for a lot of attitudes in society, and something that I would like to help people overcome. And one of my big messages is “There’s no one best way.” Except for the way that allows a lot of different ways.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Question: What are you best known for?

Transcript: Well for me, one of the things that’s best known about me is that I spent 10 years of my life as the editor of Reason magazine, which is the leading libertarian magazine. And there’s sort of two ways to be a libertarian. There’s sort of . . . One is to be always looking for how shocking you can be, and how sort of outré and different you can be. And there are a lot of people that really enjoy that. That’s not me. I have friends who are like that and they’re great people, brilliant and principled, but that’s not me. My way of saying, you know, taking this somewhat out of the mainstream political philosophy, although it’s well within the sort of mainstream of western liberal thought, is to say how can we start from where we are and move forward? I’m an incrementalist, sort of a reformist rather than a revolutionary. And I also want to communicate to people starting from the values that they hold and say, to me it’s not about syllogism. It’s about sort of making a better world. And I think we generally agree on what is the better world. We just disagree on maybe how to get there. So that’s part of it, and a lot of it has to do with mainstream. I was also . . . Before I was at Reason, I was a mainstream . . . I was a member of the mainstream media. I was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal and a writer for Inc. magazine. I was a business journalist, and I brought the tools that you learn in that realm about story telling, and reporting, and being factually accurate, and all those sorts of things into the world of opinion journalism. And didn’t say like there’s a different standard for opinion journalism. So that’s another way that being sort of mainstream, but also different, has been a big part of my life. And I’m a divergent . . . how can I put this? I think differently from other people. That’s my sort of competitive advantage I guess as a writer. I don’t quite understand it. To me the things that I see are, if not obvious, they are certainly things that, after I’ve thought about them for a while, they’re obvious; but people find them interesting. So that’s good for me.

Question: How has your work contributed to expanding libertarian thought?

Transcript: Well, I think that I actually have given a broad range of people a deeper sense of the strengths of individual freedom, and the freedom particularly to innovate and try new things, and try things and fail, and try things and succeed. I wrote a book published in 1998 called “The Future and Its Enemies” which was about a dynamic vision of the world. Dynamic being sort of how progress can take place not from a single plan and a single goal, but from divergent goals, and divergent plans, and bottom up experimentation and feedback. And it had to do with business innovation. It had to do with technology. It had to do with social structures. And it had to do with politics, but it wasn’t narrowly political in the left, right sense. In fact it was arguing that we’d better understand the world today on many important issues. Not in the traditional left versus right, but between dynamism. This sort of bottom up process, an open ended future and various forces of stasis where they want to keep things the same or very controlled and planned in advance. So I think through that sort of . . . through that book, and also through that writing, people have come to . . . People who would not have subscribed to Reason magazine necessarily, or see themselves libertarian because this is not a libertarian book. It’s about a broader . . . sort of something that includes but is not exclusively libertarian. I think people have come to a broader appreciation of that.

Question: Do you have a personal philosophy?

Transcript: Well there is a philosophy, but it’s not a simple creed. Which is hard for people to understand sometimes because I’ve edited this libertarian magazine for 10 years. And a lot of people think that can be summed up as something like government is bad, which I don’t believe. Or even freedom is good, which I do believe; but then what do you mean by freedom and exactly how do you express it? I think that there is a belief in potential of the individual, and individuals who join together to do things . . . voluntarily joining together to do things, creating institutions. I have a great belief in the value of learning as both an individual endeavor and a social endeavor. And a lot of what “The Future and Its Enemies” is really about at its core is how societies learn. And in some sense whether there’s some places you shouldn’t go, and whether it’s okay to have open-ended learning. How you find improvement. I have a sort of belief that we only get one life, and that while some people would take that to mean, you know, “Oh you should just be cool to other people,” I take it to mean that you really need to value other people’s lives and your own, and to maximize what you do with your life, and to recognize the value of other people’s lives as well. And looks to ways to improve the quality of the lives of others as well as yourself. And by the way, I don’t think there is anything wrong . . . This is not some sort of self abnegation. I believe that people should look to do well by themselves as well. But I like the Scottish philosophers that I very much admire from the 18th century. Hume and Smith and those people. I put a very high value on sympathy and empathy, and this sort of morale imagination to put yourself in another person’s place.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Question: Where are you from and how has that shaped you?

Transcript: I carry a few sort of interesting, and in some ways unexpected things from my childhood. One is that I grew up in Greenville in the deep South in the ‘60s and ‘70s. And my parents, while they were not activists, they were supportive of the Civil Rights Movement at a time when that was an unusual position to take. And one thing that I learned from them I’ve realized in my adult life was how to be both a dissident, different, and also very mainstream at the same time, because they were very imbedded in their local community. They were not alienated from it. They were not weird in any way, but they had these very different views. And that’s something . . . In that particular case it was the Civil Rights Movement, and obviously growing up in the era, in that place, issues of race are issues that can . . . they don’t . . . they’re not at the center of my work, but they inform my background and who I am somewhat. But the real thing that I learned from them was about being different, but also mainstream as opposed to having to see yourself as sort of an alternative, or being alienated from the general culture. At the same time, growing up there and having the personality that I have, and being female, and being very sort of assertive and intellectual, I was very alienated from the local culture. And so I was very happy to leave, I have to say, with all due respect to the fine people in Greenville. And so that’s another thing. Another aspect is that it is the buckle of the Bible belt. My family is liberal but devout Christians. I come from . . . My grandfather was a Presbyterian minister. I come from a very churchgoing background. I am not myself especially religious, and I also converted to Judaism in my early adult life. So I’m very different from that, but the fact that I grew up in that culture, that I really know the Bible, but I really know what it’s like to be a religious person who is an actual believer where it informs every aspect of their life, and to live in a culture where that’s normal is another thing that I carry with me into my life in this sort of public realm. And then finally, and the one that most directly informs my work, is that I lived in a poor place at a time that it was experiencing economic growth.

Question: How has the South changed in your lifetime?

Transcript: you know, the U.S. South, if you go back to right after World War II, was basically sort of like a rich third world country. I mean it would be, you know . . . and it had . . . The fact that it’s not poor today is really quite a miracle of economic development. And people who are from the South I think appreciate the benefits of just material prosperity more than sometimes people in other parts of the country. And they also see the economic progress that is taking place in this country over the past 20, 30 years that sometimes the rest of the country doesn’t recognize. And particularly sort of the intellectual class concentrated in New York, L.A., very expensive cities doesn’t recognize how much economic progress there’s been.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Transcript: I think one question is you know, “What do I know that other people ought to know?” And that doesn’t have to be some grand thing. That can be, you know, how to fix some annoying thing that goes on in people’s TVs or something. I don’t know. Whatever. So that’s an interesting question. “How do I spread the things that I know?” And there’s been a lot of work . . . This is what something like Wikipedia is about. Then Wikipedia has its advantages and disadvantages; but it’s about sort of tapping that dispersed knowledge in a way that you could have entries on things that it would never be worth it for the encyclopedia Britannica. They have some esoteric interest entry on some very narrow, geeky subject; but you can do it that way. So I think that’s an interesting question to ask people.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Transcript: Well I think the real challenge, and this is a challenge whether you’re thinking about technological innovation and business where we do this very well, or if you’re thinking about combating terrorism where we do it much less well. The challenge is how do you tap the dispersed knowledge, and the dispersed creativity of the large population, as opposed to the sort of early 20th century model which came out of certain advances in the industry at that time, which was you plan for the top. And you make it efficient. And you figure out what your goals are. And you make your plan. And you go there and you regulate it, and you direct, and you figure out how you are going to identify in one place what the threads are, or what the opportunities are. The business world, and the economic world, and the creative industries, and all sorts of . . . the social world . . . has evolved very rapidly away from that model. But if you look at, for example, sort of the way we do national security. It doesn’t take advantage of that. It’s hard because it’s based on sort of having a centralized direction. We spent the latter part of the 20th century sort of our technocrats versus the Soviet technocrats. And our technocrats were more sort of dynamic, and innovative, and informed by the society where there was a lot of decentralized knowledge and innovation then theirs were. Also it was very beneficial. Now we’re in a world where we’re dealing with decentralized, innovative, in some come well-funded people who mean us ill. And what do we do with that? How do we take the strengths of our society and bring them into these sort of bureaucracies and into government planning? I don’t have an answer for that. I just think it’s the big question. And if you look at for example the immediate response to 9/11, how was lower Manhattan evacuated? It was not by somebody having a plan, because nobody planed to have to do that. It was by little guys with boats coming and picking people up. And people innovating on the fly of how to get people out. And it was not panic, and it was not riots in the streets and all the things that people think of in a disaster. In fact it was a great deal of cooperation. And the question is how can you take all those social impulses that are there in our society and in a non-crisis situation like before the crisis happens . . . how do you tap into that? And that’s an interesting question. And I think there is a great deal of strength out there in this sort of dynamic culture that we have.

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Question: Do you have a creative process?

Transcript: I really wish I had a good answer to that. You know, it’s kind of like, “Well, I walk around and I look at things, and I read a lot.” And when I find out about an interesting person I will sometimes try to interview them, particularly if I can come up with an article, and I sleep on it. Quite literally, I get a lot of these ideas while I’m asleep or in that sort of twilight zone. And the process of writing actually helps too, because just as somebody who does mathematical modeling has to sit down and actually take their vague notion and to turn it into equations, in the case of me writing, while I take, you know, I usually start with some sort of intuition and then I refine it. And while I’m actually sitting there I’ll have other ideas. And I’ll realize, “Oh that doesn’t really logically follow” What about this? What about that? I look for interesting academic research, which is often hard to find because if you don’t have a popularizer who’s already popularized it, how do you find it? It’s easier for me within the world of economics because I know a lot of economists. I wrote an economics column for the New York Times for six years, and over the course of doing that I learned a lot. But I learned how to do it in other fields, and you follow footnotes. You read an interesting book, it has footnotes. You go look up the things that they’ve footnoted. I read a lot of history. I think that we have a tremendous amount to learn about the present and the future from studying the past. Not just in the sense of where we got here, but in less sort of linear sense of analogy, and inspiration, and synthesis.

Question: What are the recurring themes in your work?

Transcript: Well, I think there’re several themes that run through that I continually return to, sometimes without realizing that I’m doing it until I’m in the middle of it and, “Oh my god. This is the same thing that I’ve done in a previous book with a different direction.” One is I’m very interested in the, as are many people, in sort of the biological century. What does it mean to think about human beings as biological creatures, and to increasingly understand what that means, and to increasingly have control over it? Which is actually a subset of a broader interest of mine which is in the relationship between the natural and the artificial. And there’s a chapter in “The Future and its Enemies” about nature and artifice, which I think is the best chapter in the book. There’s this tension. It’s a theme that comes up in the substance of style, because style is an artificial construct. What does it mean, particularly when you think about a human being? What’s authenticity? Is it looking the way you sort of . . . that you have gray hair that shows you’re a certain age? Or is it your personality that you would dye your hair blond, or brown, or green, or whatever? Which is the authentic thing? And that’s related to nature in artifice. And then I’m just starting on a book on the idea of glamour as an imaginative process. And a lot of that is about artifice and what does it mean to construct an image or an ideal. So that’s a theme that runs through a lot of my work.

Another theme that runs through my work is the creation and discovery of economic value, and the sources of economic progress. And the economic value as an expression of psychological, physical needs, and the coming together of creativity and desire, and how that process works. That’s very much what “The Future and Its Enemies” . . . a lot of what “The Future and its Enemies” is about. So on a big scale, it’s very much what “The Substance of Style” is about in a narrower way. And that is related to the big question of economics, which is the Adam Smith question: Why are some countries rich and some countries poor? Which leads you into questions of institutions. Which is another theme I find myself . . . In “The Future and Its Enemies”, there’s a chapter on rules. What sort of rules do you need to have? It’s not just about everybody does their own thing and there are no rules. But you don’t want to have the rules be so prescriptive that there can’t be innovation. And what sort of rules do you need in the idea of certain _________ rule sets. That was in “The Future and Its Enemies”.

Question: What rules do you need?

Transcript: I discovered, when I was writing “The Substance of Style,” and I was writing a chapter on aesthetic conflict, which particularly has to do with, you know, if you really hate my ugly house, how should we deal with that question? And I found myself rediscovering. Really honest to god, I didn’t start with the same rules. I did it from scratch. Rediscovering a very similar set of rules for dealing with those questions. It was at the issue of institutions and how people live together, especially in close proximity. How you negotiate the intractable conflicts of value that occur. How you minimize conflict given that people are really different and that’s the fact that people are really different. The existence of human heterogeneity. The fact that people . . . I do not think like you exactly. We have a lot of things in common, but we really are different people. There are different subsets of people. That’s true whether you are thinking about biology. That’s true whether you’re thinking about values, life paths. How do we take advantage of that, which is what economic specialization is all about. What are the . . . there’s a tremendous amount you can learn from the . . . I use the word heterogeneity because diversity has taken on this narrow sense of ethnic diversity, which is one form of heterogeneity, but by no means the only form. How do we deal with that in a positive way? What are the institutions and organizations and just attitudes that make that a positive thing? And how do we negotiate the conflicts that come from the fact that people really have different tastes and really have different values? And a tremendous amount of our public discourse is about why my preferences ought to be everybody’s preferences. So for example, I’ve done a lot of writing on the urban forum, and cities, and the evolution of retailing, and urban spaces. It’s sort of an area that interests me. Well one of the things that comes up again, and again, and again in that area is that people want every neighborhood to look like their ideal neighborhood. And what . . . My message there is let’s have a pluralist. Like let’s accept . . . The same way we accept different churches, and different religions, and different political views, we also have different aesthetic views, and different lifestyles. And some people want to live in high density neighborhoods where they can walk to things. And some people want their little patch of suburbia with their yard, and their dog, and their kids. And other people want to live in the countryside. And we shouldn’t say that there’s one right land use planning way. So that’s just one example of heterogeneity. I mean another more purely business and technology story that I’m currently working on is I’m looking at the incredible problem of how do you attach sizes to clothing? How do you . . . it’s not just big versus little. It’s how do you do the proportions. Everybody’s body is different. People who have the same height and weight may have vastly different proportions, and there are tremendous difficulties when we have standardized production and heterogeneous population of consumers. There’s a business problem. There’s a technology problem. There are issues of how you take advantage of certain information technology we have today. And there’s also a psychological issue. Because then people come into the store and nothing fits. It’s not just fat or skinny. It’s not just they needed a bigger size and they don’t want to admit they’ve put on a few pounds. It doesn’t fit because they don’t have a standardized body, and then they feel like there’s something wrong with them because they’re not “standard”. And I think that’s a metaphor for a lot of attitudes in society, and something that I would like to help people overcome. And one of my big messages is “There’s no one best way.” Except for the way that allows a lot of different ways.

Recorded on: 7/4/07